Jim West On Chess: "The New York Times" Starts Chess Blog

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

"The New York Times" Starts Chess Blog

On Sunday, The New York Times launched a chess blog called Gambit.

It is written by FIDE master Dylan McClain who has replaced their retiring chess columnist, grandmaster Robert Byrne.

The inaugural entry discusses the 2007 United States Chess Championship which begins today in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov